God's Philosophers - A Review

You have put a builder [Archimedes] before Aristotle who was no less knowledgable in these arts!...After Archimedes, you have put Euclid as if the light after the lantern!'

Julius Caeser Scalinger

In the 16th century, the humanist writer Julius Caesar Scaliger published what would later be described as ‘the most vitriolic book review in the annals of literature’, a tirade against Jerome Cardan’s ‘On Subtlety’. It was over 900 pages in total - twice the length of the book it was reviewing - and it attacked Cardan vehemently for almost every aspect of the book. When Scaliger received no reply from Cardin he managed to convince himself that his efforts had caused his literary opponent to die of shame and decided to write him a glowing epitaph. According to the obituary, the late Cardan had been ‘a consummate master of the humane letter’, ‘a great man indeed’ gushed Scalinger. One can only imagine his horror when he found out Cardan was still alive and well and doubtless wondering why his opponant had so quickly changed his tune. This is just one of many entertaining anecdotes in the pages of James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers which I chuckled over as I read through it. Hence I will not be giving the author the Scaliger treatment, not least because it’s also one of the best narrative histories I have read in a long time.

God’s Philosophers begins with the famous quote by Issac Newton, that his achievements had only been possible because he was ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ (in keeping with the tone of the book, we learn that it was actually Bernard of Chartres who said this first in the 12th century). In contrast the Humanists of the ‘Renaissance’ era felt they were squatting on the shoulders of intellectual midgets; a menagerie of long winded medieval ‘logic choppers’ and ‘wordmongers’ who wrote in ‘barbaric’ Latin and had failed to properly understand the writings of the ancients. This scorn of their forebears began the longstanding myth that the Medieval period constituted an age of darkness and ignorance, a narrative which was adopted wholeheartedly in Enlightenment France and disseminated in the late 19th Century by the infamous Andrew Dickson White. This impression of the Middle Ages remains alive and well today despite having been almost overwhelmingly discredited in the academic community. For example, leading historian of science Edward Grant laments that ‘the medieval period in Western Europe has been much underestimated and maligned, almost as if fate had chosen it as history’s scapegoat’. Another historian, David Lindberg bemoans the fact that ‘the ignorance and degradation of the Middle Ages has become a kind of article of faith among the general public, achieving the status of invulnerability merely by virtue of endless repetition’. Hannam’s objective has been to reverse this trend by bringing the fruits of modern scholarship in the history of science to a wider audience and demonstrating that the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages contributed directly to the achievements of modern science.

In the popular imagination, the period from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 500 to the arrival of the millennium in the year 1000 is a superb candidate for a Dark Age. Yet Hannam shows – by reference to the changes which took place in his home village of Otham - that significant technological progress took place. Much of the classical heritage of Greece and Rome was cut off from Western Europe, but from the ruin of the Empire there gradually arose a society sustained by improved agricultural techniques and powered by advances in machinery; the horse collar, three field crop rotation and the widespread use of water and tidal mills would ensure that Europe could support more people than ever before.

As intellectual culture was rekindled in the West on the wave of a population explosion and increased stability, a great translation movement emerged which would bring the fruits of Classical learning to Europe through the works of Arab natural philosophers. Before this Medieval intellectuals, such as William of Conches, Adelard of Bath and ‘the mathematical Pope’, Gerbert of Aurilliac, had to make do on scraps from the ill fated Boethius and a few other authors. As the translated texts arrived from Spain and the Mediterranean, they were greedily absorbed into the medieval university; a type of legally autonomous corporation which could foster higher learning and carve out privileges from both secular rulers and the Church. The volatile and pugnacious Peter Abelard had championed logic in his teaching; and, due to a series of calamities and quarrels, he ended up being nocturnally castrated, sentenced to perpetual silence and confined to a monastery. Upon his death, his ideas quickly dominated Christian scholarship. Natural philosophy would also gain an exalted status in the curriculum as the ‘handmaiden’ of theology; a guide to better preaching and a tool to combat the growing problem of heresy.

Yet the philosophy of the ancients was not straightforwardly compatible with the teachings of Christianity. Hannam is strong at outlining these issues and the subsequent efforts of Albert the Great and the more famous Thomas Aquinas to assimilate the new learning into a suitable framework. This came with the publication of the Summa Theologiae which was ‘such a successful amalgamation of Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine that some Catholics have since failed to distinguish between the two’. Yet it was the conservative backlash represented by the condemnations of 1277 which would delineate the boundaries between natural philosophy and theology and explore non Aristotelian physical and cosmological alternatives.

By this time, an international intelligentsia of scholars had emerged using the common language of Latin. They were able to enjoy considerable freedom under the cultural unity and political fragmentation of the period. This section of God’s Philosophers was perhaps the most enlightening, not least because so many of these figures remain undeservedly unknown or misunderstood. A chapter is devoted to demonstrating the syllabus of the medieval university through the life of Richard of Wallingford, a figure who perfected the mechanical clock and ‘left a mechanical legacy without equal’. Peter the Pilgrim became the first to realise that magnets have polarity (a critical insight for medieval navigation). Following in the footsteps of Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon promulgated a strong rhetoric of experiment and provided a powerful synthesis of optical theory. However, as Hannam shows, he has been mis-portrayed as a modern thinker. The principle motivation for his promotion of the sciences appears to have been his belief that the apocalypse was imminent and that the Jews and Arabs would have to be quickly converted to the true faith before the anti-Christ and his minions showed up (one can compare this to the present day belief of Richard Dawkins that the natural sciences must be used to convert everyone to atheism before the Christian fundamentalists and the Islamists bring on the apocalypse).

In the Fourteenth Century, a series of remarkable individuals emerged who would propel Medieval natural philosophy beyond the achievements of the ancients, combining mathematics and physics in ways that had not been achieved before. The setting for these scholars were the quadrangles of Merton College. Thomas Bradwardine, later Archbishop of Canterbury, tried to establish a formula to properly describe Aristotle’s laws of motion with the first use of a logarithm. Ultimately Aristotle’s laws of motion were completely wrong, but Bradwardine had made an important step forward. Both he and the talented mathematician Richard Swineshead adopted thought experiments and tried to think through the mathematics. William Heytesbury is credited with the first use of the mean speed theorem (though neither he nor his contemporaries had any idea of its immense significance).

Yet it would be Paris, not Oxford which would see ‘the apogee of Medieval Science’ as the ideas of the Merton calculators crossed the channel. It was the rector of the University of Paris, John Buridan, who rejected Aristotelian ideas concerning violent motion. In its place he formulated the concept of impetus and used it to describe how the planets keep moving in their orbits. He also came close to the modern principle of inertia. Perhaps inspired by Bradwardine, Buridan also compared the universe to a giant clock or ‘world machine’ which the creator had wound up, a forerunner of the later mechanical philosophy. One of the issues considered by Buridan was the possible rotation of the earth. This was an idea taken further by his pupil, the brilliant Nicole Oresme who refuted most of the objections to a moving earth, but in the end went with the common sense approach contained in Aristotle and the Bible. His other major achievement was to prove the mean speed theorem in graphical form. This work would spread throughout Europe before the Black Death swept in and decimated the intellectual culture of Europe.

The fifteenth century saw Europe begin to regain it’s poise and the arrival of Nicholas of Cusa, a Cardinal who saw clearly the need for effective measurement in natural philosophy and whose cosmological speculations seem remarkably pertinent. It also saw the emergence of the humanist movement and their efforts to reintroduce ancient Greek into Europe; although as Hannam shows, they were also ‘incorrigible reactionaries’ seeking to ‘recapture an imaginary past’ who destroyed vast numbers of manuscripts and discarded many of the advances made in the Medieval period. Luckily the onset of printing ensured that the natural philosophy would reach the next generation of scholars, even as it was being systematically eliminated from the universities.

God’s Philosophers concludes with a broader sweep through the 16th century to show how Copernicus, Galileo and others used the achievements of the Middle Ages in their work. The term Renaissance after all, was coined partly to contrast the ‘rebirth’ of culture with medieval ‘stagnation’; although as Hannam points out, the Renaissance was ‘as much an age of faith as the Middle Ages and, if anything, more superstitious and violent’. Magical thinking became widespread and astrology and alchemy loomed large in the thought of figures like Jerome Cardan, John Dee and Paracelsus, or to give his full name, Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. In the case of Cardan, this led to an ill-advised attempt to draw up a horoscope of Christ. Their efforts led to advances in algeba, astronomy and new ideas of medicine which challenged the Galenic tradition. Human dissection emerged in the Medieval period (Hannam shows the Church never banned it, in stark contrast to the taboos in effect in much of classical antiquity). Vesalius attempted to perfect the work of Galen with his ‘On the Fabric of the Human Body’ but laid the groundwork for his overthrow. It would be William Harvey who would demonstrate the circulation of the blood and seriously weaken the Galenic edifice. The reader of God’s philosophers may well, as I did, breathe a sigh of relief that things in medicine have moved on. Medical instruction manuals of the period advice doctors to always say that the patient is sick, since if he recovers ‘you will be praised more for your skill’ and if he dies ‘his friends will testify that you had given him up’ (although with NHS cut backs on the way, perhaps this might be revived).

Elsewhere the towering figures of Ptolemy and Aristotle were being severely questioned. Both Peurbach and Regiomontanus had realised that Ptolomy’s astronomical system, with its complex geometry and clumsy equant had serious problems, yet it gave undeniably precise predictions. It would be the Polish clergyman Nicholas Copernicus who would defy expert opinion and propose a heliocentric universe. His motivation for placing the sun at the centre of the universe may have sprung from occult theories about the sun, but his arguments for the rotation of the earth come straight from John Buridan and find their echoes in Nicholas of Cusa. Unsurprisingly, Copernicus was a product of the intellectual culture of the time, although he has so often been portrayed as a lone genius defying all that had gone before.

Another figure often depicted as marking a break from the past is Galileo Galilei, yet as Hannam points out ‘Discourses on the New Sciences’ represents ‘the culmination of four centuries of work by medieval mathematicians and natural philosophers’. In his discussion of free fall, Galileo seems to be familiar with the work of the Merton Calculators and reproduces the conclusions of Oresme and William of Heytesbury. His discussion of Projectile Motion builds on the conclusions of Buridan, Tartaglia and Cardan. His observations on falling objects repeat those made a thousand years earlier by the Byzantine scholar John Philoponus and more recently by Simon Stevin. Galileo’s triumph was to produce an erudite synthesis of what had gone before and provide powerful experimental demonstrations. Similarly his contemporary Johannes Kepler was able to build upon the European Medieval tradition and solve two of the greatest problems of the Middle Ages, the movement of the planets and the explanation of vision.

Modern science emerged as the triumph of three civilizations; Greek, Arab and Latin Christian, yet the last of these is so often left out of the narrative. God’s Philosophers restores the credit the medieval period deserves and has forced me to revise my belief that there was something which could justly be called a ‘scientific revolution’ in the Early Modern period. Hannam’s book persuasively argues for continuities and shows how the achievements of Keplar, Copernicus, Galileo and others were deeply rooted in the intellectual culture which had preceded them. The Middle Ages displayed none of the ‘general decay and degeneracy’ and ‘complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences' which Condorcet and Voltaire unjustly derided it for, rather it prepared the ground for the intellectual successes which would follow.

Yet despite the stirring narrative outlined in God’s Philosophers some will doubtless maintain there was a dark age in Western Europe from 500AD to around 1250 when not very much happened in the intellectual culture of the West. The best course of action in response to this would be to cast the blighters adrift in the ruins of a collapsed civilisation with bloodthirsty barbarian raiders all around them and only a copy of Bill Brysons 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' with which to rebuild society. Then perhaps we will hear no more loose talk about ‘poor benighted Medievals’.

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Quote of the Day

"What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. -- If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Culture and Value


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Atheism and Conspiracy Theories

On this eighth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks there are still plenty of people who would rather believe that it was an enormous conspiracy carried out by the US government or Jews or whatever. Such claims are, of course, completely ridiculous, not to mention deeply offensive. The best one-stop shop debunking them is Screw Loose Change and the best essay doing the same is the one published by Popular Mechanics. Other refutations, more in line with the seriousness these theories deserve, have been done by Cracked and South Park. I place 9/11 conspiracy theories on the same intellectual level as theories that the Moon landings were fake or that the Holocaust didn't really happen.

In a recent debate with Alvin Plantinga, Daniel Dennett claimed that belief in God is also this absurd. I would argue that it actually goes the other way: atheism is, in a sense, a conspiracy theory. I'm not referring here to the ridiculous claim that Jesus never existed. Of course, that is a conspiracy theory, but I'm thinking of the more basic claim of atheism: that God does not exist, that there is no supernatural, that the natural world is all that exists.

I say atheism is a conspiracy theory in a sense because there are important senses in which it is not. Thinking that all the theistic arguments fail or that the problems of theism outweigh those of atheism does not make one a conspiracy theorist. God's existence is not blindingly obvious, so to compare those who disbelieve in Him to those who think there is a secret cabal of evil Jews running the world is, in many ways, inappropriate. So I don't mean to imply that atheism is on a par with conspiracy theories in general; only when looked at in a particular way.

The sense in which atheism is a conspiracy theory is with regards to religious experience. Throughout human history people have had experiences of "something" beyond the physical world. In fact, this is one of the most common experiences that human beings have. The atheist thesis would require us to believe that virtually all of these experiences are completely illusory. I find this about as plausible as claiming that our experiences of the physical world are illusory. Of course there are differences: everyone experiences the physical world while not everyone has religious experiences; the physical world imposes itself on us constantly, while religious experiences are usually temporary; etc. Nevertheless, the sense of the supernatural, of a "beyond," can impose itself upon us to a much greater degree than the physical world.

Some might object that atheists are not positing any actual conspirators, so to call it a conspiracy theory is misleading. However 1) atheists claim our experiences of the supernatural are simply by-products of how our brains evolved. Evolution is responsible for our having these experiences and thinking they're veracious when they're actually not. So evolution is functioning, at least metaphorically, as a conspirator, even though it lacks something that most other conspiracy theories lack -- mindful intent. 2) My focus is not on the cause of the conspiracy theory but on the effect. Atheists, by claiming that religious experiences are a widespread illusion, are making the same claim as other conspiracy theories: 9/11 wasn't what it seemed to be; the Moon landings weren't what they seemed to be, President Kennedy's assassination wasn't what it seemed to be, etc. Of course, many things aren't what they seem, but to simply dismiss the experiences of billions of people as illusory seems no more reasonable than to dismiss all the eyewitness reports that the Pentagon was struck by a large airplane and assert it was a guided missile instead.

Another possible objection is that religious experiences are radically divergent and contradictory, and this should make us skeptical of their veracity. I would argue that 1) the disagreements have been exaggerated. There are, of course, differing aspects of them and even contradictions, but there is also much more agreement than atheists are often willing to admit. 2) The fact that everyone tells the same story (that there is something beyond the physical world) is more significant than the disagreement of the details. It's therefore strange to claim that the answer must lie in precisely the opposite direction. When eyewitnesses give contradictory accounts of a car accident, we are not justified in believing that no car accident took place. 3) So at most the differences between these experiences would justify skepticism toward a particular account, but not to the phenomenon as a whole. 4) Again, this objection would apply equally to our experiences of the physical world. There are accounts of physical phenomena that neither I nor anyone I know has personally experienced. Such accounts can even seem to contradict the phenomena I have experienced. It would not be rational for me to conclude that all accounts of the physical world are therefore bogus, and all the experiences of it illusory.

Because I can, I'll end with a quote by C. S. Lewis.

If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Nagel on Evolution

Thomas Nagel is one of my favorite philosophers. He's been famous in philosophy circles since he published his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" in 1974. He recently wrote an essay in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs entitled "Public Education and Intelligent Design". In it he argues (among other things) that evolutionary biologists are over-confident when they compare the certainty of evolution with that of a spherical earth. Nagel thinks this is "a vast underestimation of how much we do not know, and how much about the evolutionary process remains speculative and sketchy." I find this interesting because in The View from Nowhere he argued that proponents of evolution are over-reaching in their application of it.

Evolutionary hand waving is an example of the tendency to take a theory which has been successful in one domain and apply it to anything else you can't understand -- not even to apply it, but vaguely to imagine such an application. It is also an example of the pervasive and reductive naturalism of our culture. 'Survival value' is now invoked to account for everything from ethics to language.
...
Even if randomness is a factor in determining which mutation will appear when (and the extent of the randomness is apparently in dispute), the range of genetic possibilities is not itself a random occurrence but a necessary consequence of the natural order. The possibility of minds capable of forming progressively more objective conceptions of reality is not something the theory of natural selection can attempt to explain, since it doesn't explain possibilities at all, but only selection among them.

This sounds very similar to the Argument from Reason, that some of the properties of mind are inconsistent with naturalism. Victor Reppert has referred to Nagel a few times at Dangerous Idea 2.

Yet while Nagel appears to be anti-naturalist, he is also an atheist. In The Last Word he writes:

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper -- namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is not a God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. ...My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.

A critique of Nagel's recent essay is at Pure Pedantry. The main point of contention is that Nagel is unaware that science is intrinsically naturalistic. The comments over there are interesting as a lot of them seem to disagree with this pronouncement. Via Keith Burgess-Jackson, another atheist who sides with Nagel.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Reviews of God’s Philosophers in the Sunday Telegraph and the Scotsman

Unfortunately, two reviews of God’s Philosophers which have appeared in the UK press are not online. The Scotsman's review was short and positive, so much so that my usual policy of taking the rough with the smooth proved unnecessary. They wrote “The polemical note is as justified here as the fresh and easy approach is welcome. Hannam, the liveliest of guides, makes enjoyable reading out of some seriously dusty history and difficult ideas.”

At the Sunday Telegraph, they handed the book over to the tender mercies of Noel Malcolm, a reviewer widely believed to be the wrath of the heavens incarnate by writers of popular history. He took to task Tom Holland’s Millenium, a perfectly good example of fast-paced narrative history, for not being on the same scholarly level as Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe. This is about as fair as complaining that the art of the comic 2000AD wouldn't pass muster in the National Gallery.

On God's Philosophers, Malcolm said some nice things: "This book contains much valuable material summarised with commendable no-nonsense clarity… James Hannam has done a fine job of knocking down an old caricature." But he also complains that no one still believes the old story that the Middle Ages when a benighted age of faith when the Church held back progress until the Renaissance. As a result, he sometimes found my pedagogical style 'grating'. No one likes to grate, but perhaps someone should send him a copy of the The Evolving World which Humphrey noted yesterday....

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Lack of Progress

I was much entertained this week to see that the spirit of Andrew Dickson White is truly alive and well in the writings of one David P Mindell, an expert on the evolution of birds and author of ‘The Evolving World’, a book written with the laudable aim of showing how the findings of evolutionary biology are deeply integrated into our culture. Sadly he also attempts to construct a thumping anti-clerical historical build-up in the opening chapter and, despite the works of Lindburg and Grant appearing in one of his footnotes, the result is a total train wreck. This next passage is somewhat typical and reminiscent of a late 19th century positivist.

Despite our ancestors’ demonstration of the human capability for observation and logic, cultural and religious forces superseded a scientific approach following dissolution of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. Instead of reliance upon observation, experience, and experiment, attention focused on sacred documents and supernatural agencies during the Middle Ages.

Mindell continues:

Lack of progress in the sciences following the decline of Greek and Roman culture around 500 ce until the beginning of the Renaissance about 1450 is often attributed to capitulation of the Roman Empire to Christianity.

Often attributed!?!, by who?; P Z Myers?, the internet infidels discussion board?, Edward Gibbon?, Jesusneverexisted.com?. Doesn’t he wonder why one of the books in his bibliography is entitled ‘The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages’ and not ‘Ignorance, woo, superstition and woeful lack of progress in the Middle Ages’. Lets see which sources he is using to support this view?

Church censorship certainly played an important role. In his New Organon, published in 1620, Francis Bacon describes the times between antiquity and his own era as “unprosperous” for the sciences: “For neither the Arabians nor the Schoolmen need be mentioned, who in the intermediate times rather crushed the sciences with a multitude of treatises, than increased their weight.” In the eighteenth century Voltaire decried the “general decay and degeneracy” that characterized the Middle Ages, as did the Marquis de Condorcet, who remarked, “The triumph of Christianity was the signal for the complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences.

Francis Bacon, Voltaire and Condorcet!. Well that certainly trumps the last 50 years of research into medieval intellectual discourse. Next time I write something on Evolutionary Biology I’ll base it on the views of Galen, William Paley and Bishop Wilberforce.

He does at least seem to know about events such as the 1277 condemnations but thinks that they:

illustrate the inevitable conflict of that era between theologians, who claim authority on matters of revelation, and natural philosophers, who promote the explanatory powers of reason.

Notably absent is the much debated view of Pierre Duhem that ‘if we must assign a date for the birth of modern science, we would, without doubt, choose the year 1277 when the bishop of Paris solemnly proclaimed that several worlds could exist, and that the whole of heavens could, without contradiction, be moved with a rectilinear motion’, nor that of the historian of science Richard Dales, that the condemnations 'seem definitely to have promoted a freer and more imaginative way of doing science’. Nor Lindberg's more cautious view of the condemnations as a 'conservative backlash' but one which nonetheless 'encouraged scholars to explore non Aristotelian physical and cosmological alternatives'.

Towards the end of the chapter, an old favourite appears:

As recently as 1847, James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician, was denounced from the pulpit for pioneering the use of chloroform as an anesthetic in difficult cases of childbirth. HolyWrit was cited to support the argument that use of chloroform was an attempt to “avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman.” In a clever turnabout, Simpson used the Old Testament in defense of anesthetics, invoking the story of Genesis as a record of the first surgery ever performed, in which God “caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam” prior to extracting a rib for the creation of Eve.

A dastardly tale to be sure; and also complete and utter hogwash. Would it hurt to do some actual research before writing your book?.

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I find your lack of belief disturbing

In a couple of recent posts, James pointed out that the logical positivist position that statements about God are meaningless applies equally to statements that God does not exist. Some commenters suggested that this only applies to hard atheism, the assertion that God does not exist. It does not, however, apply to soft atheism, which simply means that one lacks any belief in God. See here and here including the comments.

I don't understand exactly what is meant by lacking a belief. For myself, I find my belief or disbelief isn't a simple matter, but works on a scale or field so that I believe some things more strongly or weakly than others and the same holds for things I disbelieve. In the middle area is indecision or agnosticism, where I neither believe nor disbelieve, although even here there is often a leaning towards belief or disbelief. Presumably it would be incumbent upon me to explain why I place a particular claim where it is in the scale. This is obviously a simplification, as the border areas are fuzzy, and a weakly-held belief can have some positive characteristics that a strongly-held belief lacks. Yet nowhere in this spectrum do I find anything I could accurately call "lacking a belief."

However, outside of the spectrum I do find something like this. Were someone to ask me if I believe some random concept I hadn't heard or thought of before -- like whether there is an advanced civilization of penguins on the fourth planet orbiting Sirius -- I would place my belief in this somewhere in the spectrum. But prior to having this concept presented to me, it wouldn't be true to say I disbelieved it or was agnostic about it, much less that I believed it. Here I could accurately say I lacked a belief in this concept. But to make the point clearer, once I heard the idea I could no longer claim to lack a belief in it. I either believe it, disbelieve it, or am agnostic about it.

So this is why I'm confused by people who say they lack a belief in God. They have clearly heard of the idea; they're actively discussing it. Yet they specifically distinguish themselves from agnostics who say that they neither believe nor disbelieve in God, as well as from hard atheists who simply disbelieve. So, again, I don't understand exactly what they mean by this. I find no room in myself to say I lack a belief in something I have heard of. I have to agree with James: soft atheism looks like an attempt to disbelieve in God without having to go through all the rigamarole of having any reasons for it. It looks like an insistence to believe and disbelieve whatever you want regardless of the way things actually are.


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The Family in the Early Middle Ages – Part Two

In part one we looked at the differences between Roman family practices and Germanic family practices. Over the course of the early middle ages, some Roman practices would come to dominate over the Germanic practices while some Germanic practices would displace those of the Romans. When trying to determine whether it was going to be a Germanic practice or a Roman practice that would be absorbed into Medieval Europe, the force which was most responsible was the Christian Church, which became the single most powerful influence shaping the family.

A good example of this is marital theory. By the year 1000, the Germanic theory of marriage, which had stated that you don’t need the free consent of both people, had been rejected. In its place, the Roman principle that you must have the free consent of both parties was accepted. The reason for this was that the Christian theologians of late antiquity such as Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine had decided that the Roman principle was morally superior and included it in their Theology. To a surprising degree, Church leaders and theologians took on and challenged practices which had been perfectly acceptable to both Romans and Barbarians, condemning these and trying to have them expelled from Europe. Their reasons for doing so are still controversial.

Endogamy and Exogamy were two major issues. Endogamy refers to marriage within the kingroup. Exogamy refers to marriage outside the kingroup. For Romans and Barbarians endogamy was preferable to exogamy. In general you wanted to marry your relatives and you only married outside the kin group if you really had to. This is not to say that Romans and Barbarians didn’t have incest taboos. Certain relatives were off limits; brothers, sisters and direct relatives. Anyone beyond those immediate relatives were fair game, in particular first cousins if you could arrange it. As early as the 4th century, Christian Emperors began to condemn endogamy and instead required people to marry those who were not close relatives (for an (ill-advised) modern day condemnation of endogamy see here). During the course of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the prohibited degrees of kinship - the list of relatives you could not marry- grew wider and wider. By the year 1000, this list included not just first cousins but second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth cousins. They included not just blood relatives, but spiritual relatives (godparents) and those you are related to by marriage. This would be enforced by the Church through ecclesiastical discipline, excommunication and penance.

In addition to opposing marriage within the kin group, Christian leaders also opposed other practices that were acceptable and common among Romans and Barbarians. Beforehand, divorce was not overly difficult for men and women to obtain. Church leaders opposed the practice in all but a few prescribed cases. Christians also condemned infanticide and the right of the head of household to reject a newborn child. Christianity was also hostile to adoption, which in Antiquity was a legal tool that strengthened political ties between wealthy families and created male heirs to manage estates (infant adoption was rare). Roman law was pro remarriage and encouraged people to remarry within a certain amount of time. Christian theologians took the opposite viewpoint. Concubinage was condemned and it was seen as only slightly better than prostitution.

It was one thing to condemn all these practices and declare them to be sins for which one had to do penance. It was another thing entirely to get people to accept that they should abandon them. In some cases the Church's attempts failed. By the year 1000, concubinage was still widespread in Europe. However most of the practices condemned by the Church were waning and beginning to gain a social stigma. Adoption became much rarer than it had been in the Roman Empire. Polygamy had vanished but it had taken a while to stamp this out.

Merovingian kings were quite open in their polygamous practices. One king called Chlothar I was asked by his wife to find a good husband for her sister. Chlothar said that he would be willing to do so, but added that it would be helpful if he could meet the sister and get to know her so that he would be able to find a suitable mate. After meeting her and speaking with her, he informed his wife that yes, he had someone in mind…..himself!. History does not record what his wife thought of all this. Another Merovingian ruler called Dagobert I hedged his bets by marrying three women simultaneously. By contrast, Carolingian rulers never married more than one woman at one time. Charlemagne divorced a lot of women and had quite a few girlfriends on the side, but he didn’t go as far as to resort to polygamy. Carolingian rulers who lacked the personality of Charlemagne sometimes found themselves brought to heel by the popes. For example Lothair II, tried to divorce his wife in order to ditch her and marry his mistress Waldrada, but found that the papacy thwarted his efforts, something they never would have dared to do 100 years earlier.

As regards naming practices, it was the Germanic principle of only having one name which would become the norm in Europe by the year 1000. In the case of marital property transfers, the Germanic practices won out and the dowry disappeared from Europe. Instead, the ‘bride price’ and ‘morning gift’ became standard. Both the multiple names and dowry system of the Romans would return with a vengeance in the High Middle Ages as these were revived.

Why were the Christian Churches opposed to the practices I mentioned and what motivated their drive to reshape European society?. There are a number of theories as to why they were doing this and two in particular have gained notoriety. The first has been advanced by an English anthropologist by the name of Jack Goody. Goody argues that one must not take the explanations given by contemporaries at face value, mainly because these explanations often made no sense. When marriage to your sixth cousin was forbidden (seven degrees of kinship), for example, the explanation given was that ‘we have to extend the probation to seven degrees because the world was created in seven days’. According to Goody, this is such a ridiculous explanation that you cannot buy it. Even when there is a biblical precedent (e.g Leviticus) the Christian prohibition goes way beyond it.

For Goody, there is a fairly obvious pattern. Many of the practices stamped out were ‘strategies of heirship’, a means by which families could guarantee there was a male heir around and keep the family property intact. Cousin marriage would ensure that the property would stay with relatives. Another example was the Roman practice of adoption which was often used to establish male heirship. Polygamy would increase the odds of increasing male heirs. Divorce would get rid of wives that could not produce heirs. Goody maintains that the Church were involved in an unconscious strategy to weaken family structures and increase the odds of property being left to the church.

The leading critic of Jack Goody was a medieval historian called David Herlihy. Herlihy rejected Goody’s rejection of contemporary explanations and pointed to some which were not at all nonsensical. For example, the prohibition against divorce comes straight out of the New Testament. St Augustine condemned Endogamy, because marriage served the purpose of bringing people together who would not otherwise be united in bonds of love. When you married a relative you were thwarting that purpose because you were not bringing two different families together, you were all related. Therefore as an instrument of social utility, endogamy would have to be rejected allowing the tendrils of love to spread as far though society as possible.

Herlihy extended the argument to say that social engineering and morality were central to the church's prohibitions. Infanticide was rejected along with other Roman bloodshed such as animal sacrifice and gladiator shows. Polygamy was rejected because when a few men hogged all the women it would create a large body of restless men who would be prone to violence. There is a remarkable letter from Pope Gregory the Great which explains the churches opposition to marriage within the kin group as follows:

We have learned from experience that the offspring of such unions cannot thrive.

This suggests that there was at least some awareness among contemporaries that the children of closely related individuals would suffer problems.

Neither Goody nor Herlihy gained enough evidence to support their conclusions so the redevelopment of the family in the middle ages remains an open question. Personally I like the idea of a giant church conspiracy to grab everyone's money, but if pushed I would have to plump for Herlihy.

Family Life in the Early Middle Ages - Part Two

James Hannam's 'God's Philosophers' is now available from Amazon


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The Saxon Saviour

It was not until Charlemagne’s conquests that Christianity really made any headway with the Saxons. Charlemagne’s policy was to make sure that the conquered were forced into mass baptisms at the end of a campaign, and then later to send the missionaries among the Saxons in order to explain the religion to which they had just joined. Not surprisingly the Christianity of the Saxons was somewhat on the superficial side, since they didn’t really know what they were getting into. Nethertheless Charlemagne’s and the missionaries he supported did succeed in moving the eastern boundary between paganism and Christianity from the Rhine river to the Elbe river where it would remain until the time of the crusades.

One text in particular tells us a great deal about what the conversion of the Saxons entailed and some of the ways in which the Carolingians made concessions. In the first half of the 9th century, a version of the Christian gospel was translated into old Saxon, apparently so that the Saxons had a better understanding of Christianity and could read it for themselves. This version of the gospel is called the Heliand and it presents a retelling of the Gospel story as a Germanic heroic epic.

Having been thoroughly ‘Saxonised’, Christ becomes a warrior, the towns of ancient Israel become ‘hill forts’ and the three wise men become warriors and thanes. John the Baptist is called a ‘soothsayer’ and the Lord’s Payer apparently contains ‘secret runes’. When Christ leaves the wedding at Cana, the Heliand says that

‘Christ, the most powerful of kings decided to go to Capharnaum, the great hill fort, with his followers. His forces of good men, his happy warrior company assembled in front of him’

In the passage of the Gospel of Luke regarding the arrest of Jesus of Nazareth in the garden of Gethsemane the differences between the original and the Germanic version are interesting. In the original revised edition version:

Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.” He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. “Why are you sleeping?” he asked them. “Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.”

While he was still speaking a crowd came up, and the man who was called Judas, one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”. When Jesus’ followers saw what was going to happen, they said, “Lord, should we strike with our swords?” And one of them struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his right ear.

But Jesus answered, “No more of this!” And he touched the man’s ear and healed him.

The same scene in the Saxon Version appears under the titles ‘Christ’s deep fear before battle, his last salute in the garden’ and ‘Christ the chieftain is captured, Peter the mighty soldier defends him boldly’. The passage reads:

‘Christ’s warrior companions saw warriors coming up the mountain making a great din
Angry armed men. Judas the hate filled man was showing them the way.
The enemy clan, the Jews, were marching behind.
The warriors marched forward, the grim Jewish army, until they had come to the Christ.
There he stood, the famous chieftain.
Christ’s followers, wise men deeply distressed by this hostile action
Held their position in front.
They spoke to their chieftain, ‘My Lord chieftain’, they said, ‘if it should now
Be your will that we be impaled here under spear points
Wounded by their weapons then nothing would be so good to us as to die here
Pale from mortal wounds for our chieftain’.

Then he got really angry
Simon Peter, the mighty, noble swordman flew into a rage.
His mind was in such turmoil he could not speak a single word.
His heart became intensely bitter because they wanted to tie up his Lord there.
So he strode over angrily, that very daring Thane, to stand in front of his commander
Right in front of his Lord.

No doubting in his mind, no fearful hesitation in his chest he drew his blade
And struck straight ahead at the first man of the enemy with all the strength in his hands
So that Malchus was cut and wounded on the right side by the sword.
His ear was chopped off.
He was so badly wounded in the head that his cheek and ear burst open with the mortal wound
Blood gushed out, pouring from the wound.
The men stood back; they were afraid of the slash of the sword.

The author took a few liberties here. For a start, Simon Peter is supposed to be a fisherman, not a swordsman, and the gospel account doesn’t elaborate on the High Priest’s injury, or glorify it as the greatest head wound ever suffered as if it were appearing in a Rocky movie. Yet to gain Saxon acceptance of Christianity compromises would have to be made, after all what kind of God would not resist his arrest?.

The point of this passage is that Christ tells his followers to not resist, but in the Saxon version it is because he must undergo ‘the workings of fate’, the ultimate determinant of reality to the pagan Germanic peoples. When he is crucified, the cross is interpreted as a tree or gallows, which would have seemed similar to the hanging of Woden in the cosmic tree when he tried to learn the riddle of death and discovered the mysterious runes:

There on the sandy gravel they erected the gallows
Up on the field, the Jewish people set it up
A tree on the mountain

Once resurrected, the warrior Christ becomes greater than Woden having escaped his own fated death with his own power and ascending to the right hand of God; the old Gods have been replaced by the Saxon saviour.


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Pomo

Just in case you haven't seen it before, behold the Postmodern Generator. Every time you hit refresh, you get a brand new, completely meaningless postmodern essay. Enjoy!


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